Vegetarian myth busting ~ Lierre Keith

Vegetarian myth busting ~ Lierre Keith

Vegetarian myth busting ~ Superb interview with Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth. Keith touches on many of the myth busting conclusions she came to after finally accepting that her health was deteriorating after 20 years as a committed vegan.

The truth she came to was simple: Our bodies cannot be fully nourished by eating plants alone. To be healthy, our bodies need nutrients that we can only acquire by eating animal flesh and organs. Fats and proteins essential to our health are simply either missing or very poorly absorbed in an all vegetarian diet.

The reason is obvious. The human digestive system simply isn’t capable of getting at the nutrients trapped behind the cellulose cell walls of plants. Mammals that can get to those nutrients have 2 or more stomachs and a very long digestive tract. Humans have only one stomach and a digestive tract that is quite short.

But the way we raise the animals we eat is not humane or healthy either. Because of subsidies and other factors, instead of grasses, cows and cattle are fed corn. But grains like corn are not well digested by those animals and they soon become sick. To keep the animals healthy enough for slaughter, ranchers feed the animals lots of antibiotics. But this doesn’t negate the fact that their digestive systems are not able to digest the grains they are eating and doing so makes them sick. So when you eat “grain fed” beef, you are eating a sick animal.

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